Diverse Voices Quarterly Issue 1 & 2

pretended not to know he dreaded. Soma dressed in loose denim and slack-collared
shirts, baseball caps, and a leather jacket. Article by article she removed his heavy
clothing to reveal the slim, golden female body underneath. His clavicles protruded,
his breasts were soft and high, a shallow valley extended from his sternum to his navel
each time he exhaled, a swell cushioned his lower stomach. His legs were lean and
taut. She ran her pale hands over his exposed skin, sucked on his fingers, kissed his
knees, pushed their salty bodies together. Loving him felt like breaking the rules. She
was in a foreign land, wrapped around someone who existed impossibly between
genders, mapping the contours and crevices of his unexplored form.
Sophie cupped her slender hands around his breasts one night late in August and
kissed his neck. “I have looked online,” he said, his voice crackling in the stillness of
the blue-gray night, “and I think I am to get a mastectomy.”
She flexed her fingers against his softness. “But,” she said, “you don’t really have
to do that, do you?” He muttered something, too quick for her to catch. While she
waited for him to shift his arguments into English, she pressed the length of her body
to his, trying to keep them both intact.
“You do not want me to change this.”
She didn’t say anything back. Soma spoke her language slowly, carefully, spinning
out each fragile thought like a silkworm. She had learned patience there, between
those long days learning vocabulary and those clouded nights waiting for him to
explain.
“I am like a…” he began again and lifted his hand from her cheek to sketch his
meaning in the air above them. “I am trying always to trick people to believe that I am
a man. But I cannot trick me. Not while I come home and…”
“And?” she said, her throat tight.
“Come home and love you like I am a woman.”
“That’s not true,” she said and pressed her head into his shoulder to shake it
emphatically. He shrugged, dismissing her falsehood. Sophie cupped her hands to
more closely fit the swell of his breasts. Her face was buried in the sweet-smelling
curve at the base of his neck, and suddenly she was overwhelmed and frantic—she
needed his body to stay a woman’s, she needed him to shed his disguises only for her,
she needed for him to remain unexpected and unblemished. She opened her mouth
against his skin.
Around their apartment building the clouds moved, murmuring in heavy layers.
Sophie had needed to cite these Hungarian clouds to finally convince her family back
in Clayton that she hadn’t crossed the ocean on just a whim. “You don’t understand,”
she’d said, tucked into the luminous plastic of a payphone. “It’s dirty here. It’s gloomy.
I’m not here on vacation. I’m here because I’m in love.” Her mother had clicked her
tongue in exasperation at this but said nothing for once, and so Sophie was able to
listen furtively to the noises of home: the regular hiss of her mother’s breath, the
Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 1, Issue 1 & 2
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